NASA officials unveiled a model of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a new telescope which is expected to replace the aging Hubble space telescope. The $4.5 billion space telescope is bigger than the Hubble and will sit further from Earth. The total expected cost of the project is almost $3 billion cheaper than the original Hubble project.

The JWST will be 80ft long by 40ft. high and will have a mirror nearly three times the size of the one used on the Hubble. The 21ft. mirror will allow scientists to see further into the history of space. Norhrop Grumman, the contractor responsible for building the JWST telescope, expects it to have a 10-year lifespan.

The full-scale model of the JWST is currently on display near the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Although budget issues continue to plague NASA, all technical and cost schedules have reportedly been met for the past 20 months.

"We're making excellent progress in meeting all of our plans and commitments for a mid-2013 launch," said Martin Mohan, a Northrop Grumman project manager.

Until JWST is launched, NASA plans on continuing to service the Hubble -- NASA plans on launching at least one mission designed specifically for Hubble repair.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

The budget? It's big. It's really astoundingly incomprehensibly big. There are hundreds of agencies doing thousands of different, expensive things. Meanwhile, tax revenue has reached an all-time high, and assuming the Bush tax cuts are kept, will be in surplus in 2012. Not that slight (in terms of % of GDP) budget deficits are even bad; they give financial markets something to chew on, called bonds, without doing any harm to the economy as a whole.

With this astoundingly huge budget, and astoundingly huge tax base, in a country with an astoundingly massive amount of income, we have this luxury of DOING MORE THAN ONE THING AT ONCE, FFS. Jamacia? Probably can't do much more than one large project at once. 13 trillion dollar United States? A little different.

We can feed millions on welfare, millions on food stamps, provide for the health of millions on Medicaid and Medicare, and even provide for housing for millions on subsidized housing -- while still operating NASA, inspecting food, fighting wild fires. (Yes, hippies, whining about not having troops at home to fight disaster has fallen flat as Florida has more than it can even use, with 13,000 in reserve) And beyond all that, yes, we can even carry on war. The only way anyone would even know we're at war is to visit a major airport hub and look at all the people in uniform going to and fro. NASA's budget could be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled, and it'd be a mere rounding error compared to the sums spent on Social Security payments.

Bringing up Iraq just show's there's a lot of liberals that need to go have a drink, meet a girl, or do something to otherwise reduce their insane angst. No logical reason in the least for the war in Iraq to even be appearing here; there's no connection in the least, not even a distant one, and in truth their budgets have nothing to do with each other UNLESS it's MADE political by one party or the other with some insane application of unsound political grandstanding "pay as you go" bull or some such trickery.

Wow... I don't know which mythical country you're talking about, but it's not the one we live in. If it would be so easyto theoretically quadruple the NASA budget, why are they struggling to get even a fraction of that approved every year?The war has no economic impact... really? Then why is the military facing a shortage of funds in the first place? If you were correct the Apollo program never would have been killed and we would have had moon bases by now.